`Second Bird One Stone` Lacks Dramatic Spark

August 18, 1989|By Sid Smith, Entertainment writer.

Love in the time of the yuppie, despite tailor-made conditions for satire and schmaltz, is yet to prove credible fodder for theatrical storytelling.

Add to the growing list of failed aspirants Daniel Lee`s ``Second Bird One Stone,`` now being unveiled by TimeFrame Theatrical Productions at Bailiwick Repertory. It`s a pale menage a quatre with timely characters and not an atom of dramatic spark.

Lee`s highly problematical premise is tough to take in the first place. The story concerns four young professionals who were college chums at some vague point in the recent past. Audrey (Tucker Brown), whose advertising career has been perhaps the most successful so far, reads a magazine article encouraging women in a couple to add intrigue to their life by dating a second man and then introducing the two rivals at a kind of surprise party.

Audrey has long dated Rej (Thomas Beal), a man she met in college when she, her best friend Petra (Tracy Colerider-Krugh) and Paul (Bill Bradshaw)

were something of a threesome. Paul, in love with her at the time, drifted out of the picture once she cemented things with Rej.

But now she meets Paul again on the streets of Chicago, where all four characters work, and judges him the perfect contestant for her little magazine-inspired antics.

Author Lee`s idea involves a deliberate postmodern sketchiness. He reinforces this with his direction of the play, which sports a clean, abstract, highly visual style, and with Tara Denise`s stark, blue and white lighting. But the physical execution is better than the dramatics. His characters remain sketchy, too, left out in the cold in a play that refuses to settle into comedy, mystery or anything other than the bare bones of a soap-operatic cliche.

Reminiscences, conflicts and the inevitable final confrontation are predictable from the start. Nowhere is his lack of detail or credibility more obvious than in his handling of Audrey, whose cold-hearted, callous actions are nowhere near justified, explored or convincingly presented.

But, as with so many new plays by young playwrights about young people, the cast rises, proving, without much help from the script, that they can provide warm, detailed and potentially humorous portrayals. Brown`s earthy, unpredictable Audrey; Bradshaw`s edgy Bill; and Colerider-Krugh`s heartfelt Petra are especially three-dimensional.

But ``Second Bird One Stone`` the play remains as pointlessly enigmatic as its incomprehensible title.

``SECOND BIRD ONE STONE``

A drama written and directed by Daniel Lee, with lighting by Tara Denise. A TimeFrame Theatrical Productions that opened Aug. 9 at Bailiwick Repertory, 3212 N. Broadway, and plays at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, 5 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 5 p.m. Sunday, through Aug. 27. Length of performance, 1:45. Tickets are $9. Phone 883-1090.